Producers: Brunson Green, Anna Todd, Flavia Viotti and Robert Kulzer   Director: Josh Boone   Screenplay: Susan McMartin   Cast: Allison Williams, Dave Franco, Mckenna Grace, Mason Thames, Scott Eastwood, Willa Fitzgerald, Clancy Brown, Sam Morelos and Ethan Costanilla    Distributor: Paramount

Grade: D+

If she were alive today, even Fannie Hurst would be embarrassed to have written a woman’s weepie as synthetic and sappy as “Regretting You.”  Yet Colleen Hoover’s 2019 novel was yet another hit in the writer’s string of them, and it’s been brought to the screen in glossy but pedestrian fashion by Josh Boone (“The Fault in Our Stars”), working from an adaptation by Susan McMartin.  The picture is a weirdly tone-deaf treatment of material that mixes tragedy with almost sitcomish fluff in a brew that comes across as both tasteless and unintentionally bonkers.

It all begins in 2007, with a high school graduation beach party on the North Carolina coast outside the small town of Dylan, where four friends are celebrating their entrance into what in this case could be called the real world only sarcastically.  Despite a bit of de-aging, the actors are all too old for their characters, but what’s more striking is that they’re obviously wrongly coupled.  Sweet Morgan Davidson (Allison Wilson) is with frattish bro Chris Grant (Scott Eastwood), who actually says he likes her best when she’s drunk, while nerdy Jonah Sullivan (Dave Franco) is with Morgan’s wild sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) despite his obvious infatuation with Morgan.  This prologue ends with Morgan admitting to Jonah that she’s pregnant.

Seventeen years later Morgan and Chris are married, living in his parents’ old track house with their effervescent daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace).  They’re having a birthday barbecue with Jenny and Jonah, who’d been long apart but reconnected when the latter returned to Dylan to teach in the high school; Jenny got pregnant, and now they have an infant son. 

All are awaiting Clara’s arrival, but she’s delayed when she stops along the road to help her classmate Miller Adams (Mason Thames), who lives with his ill grandpa Hank (Clancy Brown) and is moving the “town limits” sign for a cute reason Clara appreciates.  Though Miller’s got a girlfriend, he clearly has eyes for Clara (and she for him), and before long they’ll be a secret couple—secret because his daddy is a drug-dealer in prison and Morgan doesn’t approve of her daughter seeing him, despite Jonah’s assurances that he’s a good kid (indeed, he proves ultra-sensitive to everyone’s feelings). (After all, it probably wouldn’t help Morgan’s case to say, “Do as I say, not as I did.”)

But the Clara-Mason romance is only one half of the story here: the other arises from a car crash that calls Morgan and Jonah to the hospital at the same time: Chris and Jenny were killed as they were both riding in her car.  It turns out they were having an affair—although it’s never raised, the really creepy question is for how long—and the paternity of Jenny’s child will become an issue.  But at least the tragedy allows Morgan and Jonah finally to become the couple they were destined to be way back in 2007, and it only took the deaths of two people—and unfaithful people at that!—to bring it about.

There’s actually a third romance in the story, between Clara’s sharp-tongued BFF Lexie (Sam Lorelos) and Efren (Ethan Costanilla), Miller’s dorky co-worker at the AMC multiplex.  Miller and Clara bring them together, providing a measure of comic relief to material that the makers apparently thought was too serious (despite the sitcom touches they add to it), as well as yet another opportunity for the product placement that’s ubiquitous throughout.  (The most egregious example comes with the movie posters covering the walls of Miller’s bedroom—he wants to go to film school, you see—all of which seem to be of old Paramount releases. But AMC theatres are frequently advertised too.)

There’s a shamelessness to that, and to the movie as a whole; it can’t even do without a happy revelation about crusty old Hank at the very close: he may be dying, but he possesses an unexpectedly big legacy to leave to Miller!

This sort of sad-happy drivel may be the right stuff for Hoover readers, but when transferred to the screen it requires careful handling not to become ridiculous.  Whatever his misdeeds behind the camera might have been, Justin Baldoni (and screenwriter Christy Hall) came closer to solving the problem in “It Ends With Us” than McMartin and Boone do here, despite the efforts of a game cast.  The older actors don’t fare especially well—Williams is artificial and Franco excessively dweebish, while Eastwood and Fitzgerald aren’t around long enough to leave much of an impression. 

But Grace and Thames make an engaging couple, though both—especially she—have some uncomfortable moments in the more “serious” episodes.  And it’s nice to see him in a role that doesn’t require fleeing from serial killers (“Black Phone”), demons (“Monster Summer”) or huge beasties (“How to Train Your Dragon”).  If the evidence in this case and in “Stars” is any indication, perhaps Boone is more attuned to material involving the younger generation.

The crafts team—production designer Bittany Hites, costumer Erinn Knight, cinematographer Tim Orr—do a reasonably good job, though the Georgia-shot movie has more of a cable look (think Hallmark Channel) than that of a major theatrical release.  The editing by Marc Clark and Robb Sullivan often feels oddly out of whack—some sequences (like Morgan’s manic house renovation and her angry attack on Chris’s car) are overextended, and others that might be expected are simply absent (Chris gets a big funeral, but Jenny none).  One might also wonder about the curious lack of secondary characters—we’re shown tons of food dropped off in front of the Grant home in the wake of Chris’s death, for example, but nary a glimpse of anybody leaving it.  Nate Walcott’s score is utterly unexceptional.                            

Hoover’s legion of loyal fans might disagree, but “Regretting You” represents a distinct falling-off from “It Ends With Us.”  If that downward trend continues, the Hoover Boomlet (a couple of other adaptations are in the works) may be shorter-lived than the Nicholas Sparks one was: in any event, the title might refer to you regretting shelling out your hard-earned cash to see it. 

Producers: Bradley Thomas, Ryan Friedkin, Youree Henley and Seth Reiss   Director: Kogonada   Screenplay: Seth Reiss   Cast: Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie, Lily Rabe, Hamish Linklater, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Kevin Kline, Billy Magnussen, Sarah Gadon, Yuvi Hecht, Jodie Turner-Smith, Shelby Simmons, Jennifer Grant, Chloe East, Jacqueline Novak, Julian Zane, Simon Khan and Jason Kravits    Distributor: Sony Entertainment/Columbia Pictures

Grade: D+

A failed romantasy that aims to warm the cockles of your heart but will likely leave you cold, Kogonada’s “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is a piece of cloying claptrap built on a feeble premise and played out much too lethargically to sustain a willing suspension of disbelief.  Instead it encourages an attitude of annoyance over its pretentious bombardment of banal life lessons.

The magical catalyst for the supposedly revelatory titular trip is, if you’re willing to swallow the conceit, the GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) in a car rented by sad sack David (Colin Farrell) after he finds his own misparked one rendered inoperative by a boot.  Serendipitously noticing a sign for a car rental joint staring at him on the sidewalk, he goes to its address in a heavy downpour (it seems to pour regularly in the movie, though people rarely get soaked, leaving that to paying viewers) and finds a couple (a screeching, wacky woman played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her quiet elderly companion played by Kevin Kline) alone at a table in a cavernous, otherwise empty room.

Anyone with half a brain would exit immediately, but David obligingly goes through a nutty application process and rents the car.  He then drives it several hundred miles from the city where he attends a wedding (in the rain, again—there’s an umbrellas-from-above scene reminiscent of Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent,” where it had a point) and meets Sarah (Margot Robbie), a sprightly, sharp-tongued woman who, it turns out, rented a car from the same joint.  Destiny has intervened, though they don’t immediately click, since both are commitment-phobic. 

The magical GPS brings them together again over cheeseburgers at a diner on their way back to the city, and when Sarah’s car in the deserted parking lot won’t start, it suggests that David gift her a lift.  Oh, the force of fate!

Their joint journey now takes them to a series of doors set up in the middle of nowhere, and by going through them they’re taken back to moments in their past or made-up scenarios that are designed to confront their psychological hang-ups.  Thus Sarah will be faced by several episodes with her late mother (Lily Rabe) whose death she was unable to accept at the time, giving her finally some sense of closure.  David will be taken back to the high school musical where he was rebuffed after confessing his love for his co-star; he’ll also comfort his father (Hamish Linklater) in the hospital waiting room where his dad was worrying about his (David’s) premature birth, as well as adopting his father’s persona to comfort his own younger self (Yuvi Hecht, oddly making no effort to mimic Farrell’s Irish accent) after that ego-shattering high school rejection.

There’s also a contrived ensemble moment when David and Sarah pass through the entrance of a coffee shop to tell their respective dates (Sarah Gordon and Billy Magnussen) that they’re breaking up with them.  Oh, how the traumas of their pasts are blocking their ability to connect with others in the here and now!

All of this is presented with leaden sincerity by Kogonada, who seems to think that what the film is saying is deep and profound and whose attempts to introduce humor (as in the scene in the car-rental place) fall utterly flat. The tone is fatal to the performances of Farrell and Robbie; his dour demeanor is rarely interrupted, while the dichotomy between her ordinary pose of cynical chirpiness and her depressed flashback desperation comes across as totally phony.  The film does look pretty: Katie Byron’s production design and Arjan Bhasin’s costumes are fine, and Benjamin Loeb’s widescreen cinematography is attractive enough, even in the multiple rainy sequences.  But the editing by Jonathan Alberts and Susan E. Kim accentuates the sluggishness of Kogonada’s direction, and Joe Hisaishi’s score can’t alleviate the lack of real magic on display on the screen.

There’s one thing of merit in the movie, though: the high school musical Farrell and Robbie are called on to recreate in part, even if the conceit is clumsy, is Frank Loesser’s “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and the excerpt reminds you how delightful a show it is.  If that prompts some to revisit David Swift’s underrated 1967 film of it (his last feature, as it turned out), the picture will have done some good.

Otherwise, the one door you’re sure to appreciate after watching Kogonada’s piece of saccharine slop is the one reading “Exit” in the megaplex auditorium.